CDRW and DVDRW "locked by another application"

[shoozleboy]

My CDRW and DVDRW drives are "locked by another application".

I checked through here and even on Google and found a few possible scenerios and helpful ideas, but none of them worked.

I have a Gateway P4 2.66ghz running Windows XP Home edition. (a little more info on that in my profile)

Specifically, I use two external drives (CDRW and DVDRW) in USB2 boxes. They have been working great until this last weekend. I created about 10 dvd's this weekend using Ulead Moviefactory 2.0, and there was no problems while I created those disks.

Since the creation of those 10 DVD's, I have been unable to use ANY CD or DVD writing program that I have to create a simple backup DVD of some digital video that I captured from a camcorder a few months ago. I'm just trying to copy the data files that I captured, all around 200-300 meg in size, to a dvd for archival purposes.

I have tried to use Alcohol 120, Nero 6.0, and RecordNow - and none of these will burn anything. Nero will start to burn, then it fails after 5 to 10 percent of the data is written. Alcohol will not even start the burning, and RecordNow tells me that there are no compatible drives available.

I get the error message with Nero (I think it's Nero..) that the recordable drives are "locked by another application" but I can not find out which one is doing it.

I emailed Gateway and they gave me a checklist of things to check on including disabling a bunch of things in the 'startup' tab of the "msconfig" setup in WinXP. I disabled everything and it still does not allow me to use my burners.

Has anyone experienced this before? What possible solutions can anyone offer?

Thanks.

[808smokey]

Uninstall all your burning software. I had that happen once with a Trial burning program. CTRL-ALT-DELETE and look at the processes close them one by one and see if you can "unlock it". Are there any strange looking programs running? Clone CD did that too me, the virtual drive it created screwed my drives up. I'll never use it again. Also "right-click" the CD/RW or DVD-RW and select properties, make sure that the box is checked "Enable writing"

[shoozleboy]

Thanks 808. I tried the process running thing already with Gateway Tech support and that didn't help.

Last evening, I uninstalled the burning packages that I was using and reinstalled one to test it out. I was able to burn a data dvd on the LG DVD-Ram drive, as well as an audio cd and another data cd. But when I attemped to burn a data dvd on the Sony drive, it failed on the lead-in. (TDK 2x -R media)

So at least I have one program working for burning stuff. (Nero 5.5)

I read an interesting article that came up in Google about the iTunes package and the Gear Security Services part of iTunes. Some people experience wierd drive problems and slow boot ups and close downs with Windows XP when they have iTunes installed. I uninstalled iTunes, but I still have the device manager showing 2 floppy drives (A: and B. I only have the A: drive installed, and I don't know where the B: drive came from.

I did have daemon tools installed but I uninstalled that as well. There's an updated version that I'll install later, after I can isolate what is causing all of this right now.

Let me ask a dork question, because maybe I missed something -

I have a Sony DW-U14A drive (DVD+-RW) that can burn -R 4x (according to manuf. specs). I am assuming that it will also burn at the -R 2x speed as well, since it can do the 4x ??? Is this correct?? The specs don't specifically say that it can burn 2x media, and now I'm second guessing myself on this....

Just before all of these problems happend, I was able to burn 10 DVD's of my home videos on Friday and Saturday using Ulead's MovieFactory. The DVD's came out perfect and I have no problems with them at all. (used the -R 4x Optodiscs from Meritline)